Part Three: July

In July, Grandma fell.

She was living alone in her little house on Jefferson Street, the same house she and Walter bought in 1961. She’d been fine. Fiercely independent. Driving herself to church and the grocery store in her 1997 Buick, which she called the Duchess.

She was hanging wash on the clothesline in her backyard. She stepped wrong off the back stoop. She put her hand out to catch herself.

She broke her left wrist in two places.

She was in the hospital in La Crosse for four days. Then a rehab facility for three weeks.

When she came out, the doctors said she couldn’t live alone anymore. Not for a while. Maybe not ever. Her wrist wasn’t healing right. Her balance was worse. She needed someone in the house.

Joel and I offered to take her. We have a spare room.

But we live in an upstairs apartment above my shop on Main Street. Steep stairs. No railing on one side. The doctor said absolutely not.

So Darla took her in.

Darla is Joel’s mother. Ron’s wife. She’s sixty-two. She works part-time as a cashier at the Kwik Trip on Highway 14, and she keeps a neat, small ranch house on the edge of town with a big garden and a dog named Biscuit.

She and Lorraine have never gotten along.

I don’t know all of it. Joel doesn’t know all of it either. Some things happened before he was born, and nobody talks about them.

But I know that for forty years, Lorraine made it clear she thought Ron could have done better. She criticized Darla’s cooking. Darla’s housekeeping. Darla’s hair, which Lorraine said looked like a haystack in a windstorm.

She did it at Thanksgiving dinner. At Christmas. At Joel’s high school graduation.

Darla took it. For forty years. Smiling with her teeth clenched.

And now Lorraine lived in her back bedroom.

Part Four: The Payee

In August, Darla became Grandma’s representative payee at the Social Security office in La Crosse.

That means she manages Grandma’s Social Security check. It goes into an account in Darla’s name, for Grandma’s benefit. Darla pays Grandma’s bills. Buys her groceries. Covers her expenses.

It’s legal. It’s common. Families do it all the time when an older person can’t manage their own money anymore.

Grandma’s Social Security is sixteen hundred and forty dollars a month.

Of that, Darla keeps twelve hundred.

For room and board. For her keep, Darla calls it.

Grandma gets the other four hundred and forty for her medications and her phone and her church offering envelope.

I didn’t know that until October.

Grandma told me. On the phone. Almost by accident.

“Darla keeps twelve hundred,” she said. “For my keep. I don’t mind. It’s her house.”

I checked.

I spent an evening on the Social Security website, reading the rules for representative payees. A payee is allowed to charge room and board. They’re allowed to use the money for the person’s food and shelter and care. It has to be reasonable. It has to be for the person’s benefit.

Twelve hundred dollars a month for a room, three meals, utilities, and someone to keep an eye on you?

In Viroqua, Wisconsin, that’s not unreasonable. It might even be fair.

Grandma was fed. She was safe. She had a warm bed and her medications and a roof over her head.

A skipped shampoo is not a call to the sheriff. It’s not something you report to Adult Protective Services.

It was our family’s shame to fix.